At my last job, I was assigned to a project being run by a straight-out-of-college developer who felt that not only were comments unnecessary, they were actually a "code smell", a sign of professional incompetence on the part of whoever added them. It's an insane philosophy that could only appeal to people who have never had to take over an old codebase.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I kind of get the idea that code should be self-documenting, but at the same time, there's so many crazy business rules that comments are basically a necessity if nothing else other than to explain why in the hell the crazed mess that provides the required functionality for the business rules exists.

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 12 points 2 days ago

Yeah some comments are not useful

# returns the value as a string
return str(user.id)

Some comments are

# returns the user id as a string because ZenDesk's API throws errors if it gets a number.
# See ticket RA-1037
# See ZenDesk docs: https://etc/
return str(user.id)

[–] PonderingPotato@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's typically what people who advocate for less/no comments really mean. The code should self explain "what" it does, but if the "why" isn't obvious (i.e. confusing business logic) nobody argues that you shouldn't comment it. That's how I've worked in every company I've been at (and all developers around me) from 50 person start ups to >2k people. It's really common mentality with Ruby developers

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Anyone complaining about commenting should be forced to code in assembly for a while.

[–] CodeBlooded@programming.dev 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Or, it appeals to people that have had had to take over an old codebase where the comments were all lies.

“Code never lies. Comments sometimes do.”

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's funny, the exact same logic applies to method and variable names. There's no compiler that ensures that a method's name accurately describes what the method does or ensures that a variable's name accurately describes what the variable represents. Yet nobody ever says "you shouldn't use descriptive method and variable names because they might be misleading". And this is hardly academic: I can't count the number of times I've run into methods that no longer do what the method name implies they do.

And yet method and variable names are exactly what people mean when they talk about "self-documenting" code.

[–] CodeBlooded@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

That’s fair!

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 3 points 2 days ago

I don't know that I could have stopped myself from asking whose nephew they are and I'm just a hobbyist